The European Commission is shortly expected to order the international credit card company Visa to lower its tariffs, just as MasterCard was ordered to do last year.
The Commission will soon conclude its investigation on the charges currently paid by retailers every time customers pay their bills using Visa. Sources close to the Commission told The Times yesterday that Visa is expected to be ordered to lower its tariffs in two weeks time, before the end of the mandate of the current European Commission.
"Negotiations between the Commission and Visa have reached their final stages and should be concluded soon," a Commission official said yesterday.
After forcing payment card company MasterCard to lower its charges last year, Brussels is now insisting with its main rival, Visa, to follow the same route.
Last April, the European Commission announced that it had sent a written complaint to Visa, over charges it imposes on retailers' banks known as MiFs. The Commission said it had reached a "preliminary" opinion that the charges infringe EU anti-trust rules.
In the case of Visa, the Commission sustains that these "high" charges do not only concern cross-border transactions, as was the case with MasterCard, but in the case of some EU member states, including Malta, these also concern domestic transactions where these charges are directly set by Visa rather than the banks.
According to Brussels these charges are "harming competition between acquiring retailers' banks, inflate the cost of payment card acceptance for merchants and ultimately increase consumer prices".
Visa's credit and debit cards represent approximately 36 per cent of all payment cards issued in the European Economic Area (EEA) comprising all the EU member states and Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. Visa has the largest acceptance network within the EEA with over five million merchants accepting its payment cards.
In 2006 a total of 27 billion card payments were made in the EEA, with a total value of €1,600 billion.
Last year, following investigations by the Commission, card company MasterCard reached an interim agreement with Brussels on reducing its fees as from June 2009.
At the same time, MasterCard is however pursuing an appeal against the Commission's anti-trust decision. MIF charges are interbank payments made for each transaction carried out with a consumer card. Retailers are charged for the fee which ultimately affects the price of goods, whether they are purchased with a card or not.
In Malta the GRTU has repeatedly called both card companies to revise their charges downwards.